What Is It to Be Human Anymore?
By Michael Hirsh,
Foreign Policy
| 04. 02. 2021
This book is not for the faint of mind. Walter Isaacson is a great storyteller who has devoted his justly acclaimed career as a biographer to such history-changing individuals as Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Henry Kissinger, and Leonardo da Vinci. Now, in his new book The Code-Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, he tries to do the same with Jennifer Doudna, the engaging and brilliant University of California, Berkeley scientist who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry with her French collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier for discovering the inner workings of gene editing. Supported by a cast of eager and intensely competitive scientists who spanned the globe from Spain to China, Doudna and Charpentier figured out how to not only make human gene editing relatively simple but also turn it into what is, simultaneously, a hope-giving and terrifying technology.
As is typical for his work, Isaacson has done prodigious research—even learning to gene-edit himself. But perhaps his biggest challenge was that it may be easier to explain the achievements of da Vinci or even...
Related Articles
By Fyodor Urnov, Time | 08.12.2024
After a lifetime in the field of epigenetics, and nearly 20 years after my colleagues and I coined the term “genome editing,” I will be the first to admit that describing the “epigenome”—a marvelous biological process that guides...
By Joy Zhang, Progress Educational Trust | 08.12.2024
What do China's new ethical guidlines tell us about the country's changing attitude to human genome editing? Professor Joy Zhang reads between the lines...
Recently, China's National Science and Technology Ethics Committee introduced a new set of ethics guidelines on...
By Priyanka Runwal, Chemical and Engineering News | 08.05.2024
Saritee Sanodiya, 26, has spent countless days wondering if she’ll ever live a “normal” life. Growing up, Sanodiya often missed school, frequenting the hospital for sudden, life-threatening drops in her hemoglobin levels and excruciating pain in her joints. High fever...
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...